the American military. I amassed whatever lawyerly skills I had, argued my case, and lost-in a face-to-face debate with Mc- N amara in the tranquillity of a summer weekend at Camp Da- vid, the Presidential retreat in the mountains of Maryland. Vietnam was not only a trag- ic turn of history but also a cauldron in which good and able men of high integrity, act- :::3 ing out of solid and well-rea- soned motives, went terribly wrong. They operated in a world nearer to the end of the Sec- ond World War than to the nineteen-nineties. Memories of Munich and appeasement were still fresh, especially in the minds of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and President John- son. Also still fresh in their minds were the success that the leaders of the government had achieved and the danger they had faced in the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962. The Communist menace was palpable. The essence of American policy, de- spite nearly two decades of domestic debate, remained varying versions of con tainmen t. I had been a partici pan t in the creation of that policy, in 1947, but I did not believe that it applied to Indo-China. Even though the odds were heavily against my preventing an escalation that was supported by the top three members of the Cabinet, the en- tire military establishment, and most of the congressional leadership, I felt I had no alternative but to ten the Presi- dent that I foresaw a calamity for the nation if he sent ground troops to Vietnam. To a large extent, my con- clusions were instinctive. I did not believe that we were threatened by the internal war in Vietnam, and I was concerned that our chances of suc- cess were much too slim to justify the risks and costs that the undertaking entailed. I had not opposed the early commit- ment to help the South Vietnamese with military and civilian advisers. The initial strategy-to help a new and small pro-Western, anti-Commu- nist government resist subversion- seemed a logical and appropriate exten- sion of earlier policies in Europe and Korea. Looking back in 1969, I wrote of the situation, "We had seen the 45 --------- N - -.....J \ ,AI A \ r.... D \? \ ) \--:::: \:> J----- _ \-\ 0 \--1 t.=- , C- 0 \"'-/'\ \;::::. ) n:) HONE j ",,-.J -0; I {j} t ) - L-==- I\r 6;J l ] ' - - _::. ---- / -:- - - /"- -=--=:;;. -=----.:::,- 'ì -- I r ; -.., ---.:-..,...J" IJ- Çk- ( , ,7-- . calamitous consequences of standing aside while totali tarian and expan- sionist nations moved successively against their weaker neighbors and ac- cumulated a military might which left even the stronger nations uneasy and insecure. . . . We had reason to feel that the fate averted in Korea through American and United Nations mili- tary force would overtake the indepen- dent countries of Asia, albeit in some- what subtler form, were we to stand aside while the communist North spon- sored subversion and terrorism in South Vietnam. " From the begInning, however, we had been constrained by the fact that our South Vietnamese allies were cor- rupt, inefficient, and poorly motivated. This fact was critical. In the final analysis, our objectives in Vietnam de- pended more on the capabili ties of our allies in Saigon than on our own efforts. And the more we did for those allies, the more dependent and ineffectual they became. It was on this point that our policy would ulti- mately fail-something I did not real- ize at first. It has sometimes been said that Viet- nam was "the liberals' war." Since many of the most critical decisions were made during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, there is a certain small truth lurking in this observation. But an understanding of the tragedy is not advanced by viewing events '0 ) f:: t "" -...L - , - -:= . through a political prism. Every President from 1950 through 1975- three Democrats, three Republicans- made mistakes in Indo-China, and the congressional leadership of both parties supported almost every key decision. During the Kennedy years, my own involvement in Vietnam was minimal. Though the President's Foreign Intel- ligence Advisory Board, of which I was a member, received occasional briefings on the situation in Southeast Asia, we concentrated on intelligence methods and organization rather than on the situation in the field. Our last discussion during Kennedy s Presiden- cy took place on September 12th and 13th of 1963, at a time when a fierce debate was going on over whether or not to encourage a military coup against the increasIngly unpopular South Vietnamese government, headed by the rigid Catholic strongman Ngo Dinh Diem. I had not been fol- lowing the situation in Vietnam close- ly, and our briefing by the normally cautious and conservative director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John McCone, startled me. The sit- uation in Vietnam had deteriorated so badly, he told us, that we might have to pullout altogether. Diem had lost all popular support except that of his home region and his fellow- Catholics, and could not win the war against the Communist guerrillas, who